Reconstruction South Carolina: The Legislature They Destroyed

Between eighteen sixty-eight and eighteen seventy-six, South Carolina had the most racially democratic government in American history. That is not an overstatement. It is a description of what actually existed.

The state constitution of eighteen sixty-eight was written by a convention with a Black majority. It mandated free public education for all children, regardless of race, becoming the first state in the South to do so. It established equal rights in public accommodations. It restructured the court system toward broader access. Joseph Hayne Rainey of Georgetown, South Carolina, was elected to the United States House of Representatives in eighteen seventy, becoming the first Black member of Congress to serve in the House. By that year, Black South Carolinians held a majority in the state legislature, served as judges, sheriffs, and school superintendents, and were building the institutions of a democracy that had not previously included them.

The Red Shirts were organized to end it. The Red Shirt movement was the paramilitary arm of the South Carolina Democratic Party, funded and directed by former Confederates who understood that the only way to reclaim political power was to make voting by Black citizens physically dangerous. They were not subtle about this.

The Hamburg Massacre happened on July eighth, eighteen seventy-six. Hamburg was a town on the Savannah River, in Edgefield County. A white businessman named Henry Getzen demanded that the Black militia company commanded by Captain Dock Adams vacate its drill hall to allow a carriage to pass. When Adams refused, the Red Shirts surrounded the building. In the confrontation that followed, four members of the Black militia who had surrendered were taken aside and killed. It was organized. It was a signal. The Democratic Party swept the South Carolina elections that fall through systematic violence and ballot fraud. Federal troops were withdrawn in eighteen seventy-seven. The constitutional architecture of eighteen sixty-eight was dismantled piece by piece over the following two decades.